How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried
about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to
emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of
a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s
rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation,
of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning
in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the
United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming
Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from
condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies
and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which
individuals and groups communicate.
Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives
through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers
from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe
in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American
intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular
culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this
transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other
in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas,
Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David
Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's
Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans,
Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
